Eastern Washington: Feeding from — and biting — government’s hand

U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., was an outspoken term-limits advocate when he ran back in 1994, saying he would serve Central Washington voters in Congress for 10 years.

The Doc is now hanging it up after 20 years. While his desire to drill, dig, and cut down everything on public lands won’t be missed, journalists are certain to develop a nostalgia for Hastings’ town meetings.

The attitude of Doc and the choir to which he sang was contradictory: We want big government off our backs but we want bigger support from government.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation: The federal government built the Tri Cities as a center of plutonium production, and sustains its economy cleaning up the nation’s largest concentration of radioactive waste. (Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com file photo)

While Central Washington is our most conservative, Republican turf, it is dependent on Uncle Sam.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal built Grand Coulee Dam and made half-a-million acres of desert bloom.

Tea Party-backed U.S. Senate candidate Clint Didier had to fess up in 2010 that he had received $273,000 in federal subsidies on his Franklin County farm. Irrigation rates in the Columbia Basin are heavily subsidized.

The World War II Manhattan Project, and creation of the 560-square-mile Hanford Reservation, literally built the Tri-Cities as a center of plutonium production for nuclear weapons.

When building bomb innards ceased, cleanup of the world’s largest concentration of nuclear waste sustained Hanford — although Richland’s pro tem mayor once said the reservation’s work force was not cut out to be “janitors.”

The picture is similar across Eastern Washington, from Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Wainwright medical center in Walla Walla.

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.: Hastings opposed big government while representing a Central Washington district whose economy was created by the federal government.

Watching Doc was a study in the feeding habits of a pander bear.

He voted for drastic cuts in federal social programs, yet fought for federal dollars to enhance water storage in the Yakima Valley. He was part of a Republican House leadership that produced a budget sequestration that disrupted cleanup at Hanford and furloughed thousands of workers.

At a memorable Okanogan town meeting, Doc sympathized with those demanding that national forest lands be turned over to the states and, at the same time, called on the U.S. Forest Service to rebuild and repair logging roads.

The pummeling of government while accepting its favors became a political culture about 30-35 years ago, under the presidency of Doc Hastings’ hero, Ronald Reagan.

Gratitude and balance are not part of the culture.

In early 2004, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray deployed her committee clout — and a raucous public hearing — to halt in its tracks Veterans Affairs’ plan to shut down the Wainwright medical center. Walla Walla County turned around and voted against her that fall.

Along with area county commissioners, Hastings fought against designation of a Hanford Reach National Monument on federal lands flanking the last undammed stretch of Columbia River between Bonneville Dam and the Canadian border.

The monument, created by President Clinton, has been a boon to visitors, hardly the “lockup” described by those who picketed Vice President Al Gore at its dedication.

Our state tax dollars flow out of the Puget Sound basin and into Eastern Washington counties that deliver big majorities to Tim Eyman’s anti-tax initiatives.

In an on-target Friday editorial, the Herald of Everett voiced hope that Central Washington will get a better House member, “a sensible center Republican or Democrat (perhaps a Latino) repelled by ideology and tuned to the greater public interest of the district and state.”

A final Hastings town meeting tale: The crowd at the Okanogan livestock auction was railing against big government, with an ugly undertone of anti-immigrant talk. Doc was going with the flow. A Malott orchardist, of long acquaintance, frowned and ducked out for a smoke.

Don’t those people in there realize, he asked while pacing outside, who supplied the cheap power and irrigation water that built Eastern Washington’s agricultural economy? Didn’t they appreciate who (e.g. immigrants) supplied the labor?

No, or perhaps people chose not to.

As with lots of House members, from many other government-dependent districts, Doc was taking pages from the playbook of rugged individualism.